Archive for 2014
September 2, 2014
THE HILL: Economy no savior for Democrats.
Democrats are running out of time for an economic savior.
They have long predicted that an economic turnaround would be the elixir that helps them retain control of the Senate in November.
But with just a handful of big economic reports left before Election Day, the economic picture is largely in place. And while the outlook is bright, voters continue to hold a dim view of their own financial prospects. . . .
Broadly speaking, the economy has made gains in the last several months. The unemployment rate has held steady or dropped every month for over a year, and new data shows the economy grew this spring at its fastest rate in more than 12 months.
But the good news isn’t resonating with the public.
Perhaps it doesn’t match up very well with the public’s actual experience.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: IRS scandal needs a special prosecutor. I only sort of agree. Anyone Eric Holder appoints is likely to be a Dem shill. Let a Republican name a special prosecutor in January of 2017.
SARAH HOYT ON THE JOYS OF MODERN LIFE: “It just seems that every woman my age has been divorced three times, or is shacked up with some guy half her age who is eating out her savings. Every younger woman is having kids out of wedlock starting well before seventeen. And I keep thinking: Oh, h*ll. When did everyone who grew up with me become… low class?”
When things go downhill, they can go downhill pretty fast.
MICHAEL BARONE: Would black voter turnout matter in key Senate races?
Jonathan Martin of the New York Times reports on how Democratic Party strategists are hoping to maximize black turnout in order to preserve their Senate majority. One might question whether this really counts as news, given that black Americans have been voting overwhelmingly Democratic for a half-century: It always makes sense for Democrats to mobilize black turnout. But the fact that Democratic spinmeisters are evidently pitching this line carries a whiff of desperation. For the fact is that there are relatively few blacks in most of the states with seriously contested Senate races. . . .
It’s apparent that even the most vigorous black turnout effort in the eight states with low black percentages is not going to make much difference. Democrats there must hope that their candidates can maintain levels of support from whites at or above the levels achieved by Obama in 2008 and 2012. In addition, Democrats in Colorado must hope they can maintain something like the 75 to 23 percent margin Obama won among Hispanics there in 2012 according to the exit poll. . . .
In the five states with above-national-average black percentages, there’s obviously good reason for Democrats to try to bolster black turnout. But to win a Democratic candidate must also do significantly better than Obama did among whites in Arkansas, Georgia and Louisiana and somewhat better than in North Carolina. Black turnout was very robust in North Carolina, thanks to both the Obama organization and to spontaneous enthusiasm. And it was robust in the three other states as well, due to spontaneous enthusiasm and despite laws requiring voters to show photo identification, a measure which some have likened to the police dogs and fire hoses that Democratic National Committeeman Bull Connor unleashed on peaceful blacks in 1963.
No hyperbole there. . .
A COUPLE OF 55-GALLON DRUMS OF TEQUILA, AND I’D CALL THAT A PARTY TO REMEMBER: Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant – 55 Gallon. What’s amazing is that there’s only one left in stock. But the reviews are amusing.
SPYING: Did Brennan Dodge A Bullet? “CIA Director John Brennan may have dodged a bullet over his agency’s potentially unconstitutional snooping on the Senate, but critics insist his reprieve is only temporary. Calls for the spy leader to resign after the CIA admitted that officials spied on the Senate have lost steam in recent weeks, since lawmakers left town for a five-week summer recess. . . . But lawmakers and advocates pushing for a change at the top of the spy agency say that the issue has only been temporarily sidelined and won’t disappear for good.”
PRESIDENT SUB PAR: Putin Plows on as West Watches. “Putin has made his open, naked and total contempt for the strategic intelligence and the political will of the West’s leaders impossible to ignore.” It’s increasingly hard to argue with, too.
NICK GILLESPIE: If Democrats Seek to “Rally Blacks” Against Police Militarization, They Might Start with the Congressional Black Caucus. “Among the African-American members of Congress voting against the amendment (and thus in favor of continued federally aided militarization of police): Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), who represents Ferguson.”
Expect absurd new highs in race-and-gender theater between now and November, as the Democrats desperately try to motivate their base in the face of massive Obama failure.
MORE WOMEN COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois Pays Women Staffers Less Than Men.
JOEL KOTKIN & RORY COHEN: When patrimony trumps political preference.
Jews, despite their above-average affluence and their entrepreneurial bent, have long been among the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party. Half of American Jews earn more than $100,000 annually, three times the national average and far more than typical members of mainline Protestant churches. The only real competition, economically, comes from another outsider group: Hindus.
In 2008, President Obama received roughly 80 percent of the Jewish vote and, four years later, his percentage remained just under 70 percent, even though the alternative candidate was clearly more pro-Israel and enjoyed the support of some Jewish billionaires.
Some Republicans point out that Mitt Romney’s show of support among Jews was the strongest since Ronald Reagan ran against Walter Mondale in 1984. They suggest that Jews may finally be shifting toward the center and even to the Right.
Changes in attitudes toward Israel, and Jews, could hasten this process. After all, it is painfully obvious that opposition to Israel has now shifted from the traditionally anti-Semitic Right to the multicultural Left, and its various offshoots in the media and on campuses. The growing disconnect between left-leaning Jews, such as Peter Beinart, Jon Stewart, Max Blumenthal and Ezra Klein, and Israel makes such a shift easier.
This reflects a growing change in the nature of opposition to Israel, and anti-Semitism, in the West, from the old Right to the liberal-dominated media and the academy. Universities, for example, serve as ground zero for powerful boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel. The campaigns’ purpose is not only to hurt Israel’s economy, or protest its sometimes-unwise policies (such as expanding settlements), but also to cast her as a pariah state.
This is intriguing, indeed, since there seems to be no academic campaign to rein in such huge human-rights abusers – whether against Christians, females, gays or other minorities – as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Egypt. Only crimes by the Jewish state seem to qualify.
So many Jews seem to fear and dislike Christian Evangelicals. But that’s who’ll be standing beside them as anti-semitism grows. Maybe some people are starting to notice.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Email Reveals Lois Lerner Ignored Political Expenditures By Unions.
September 1, 2014
GIVEN THE CURRENT SEX PANIC, ONCE AGAIN HERE’S PROF. MARK PERRY: Before declaring that there’s a ‘rape epidemic’ in the US, has anybody bothered to check the actual data? Apparently not.
We keep hearing in the news about a general “rape epidemic” in America and more specifically about a “campus rape epidemic.” A White House task force headed by Vice-President Biden tells us that “one in five female college students has been assaulted, but that just 12 percent of such attacks are reported.” I’ve demonstrated statistically using actual crime reports from various universities that if the 12 percent under-reporting White House claim is true, then the 1-in-5 claim can’t possibly be true – it’s more like 1-in-20 or 1-in-30. So there’s a little bit of statistical hijinx, misreporting, and hyperbole going on at the White House on this issue.
But before generating hysteria by reporting that there’s a rape “epidemic” (defined generally as “a rapid spread, growth, or development”), has anybody at the White House or elsewhere bothered to actually check the crime data on rapes in the US? Because if they had, they would find that there’s been a steady decline, not an increase, in the frequency of rapes in America for the last 20 years.
Note this chart.
BECAUSE THEY FIGURE THE PRESS WILL COVER FOR THEM? Why Won’t Endangered Democrat Senate Candidates Repudiate Their Todd Akin?
Democrat Amanda Curtis makes YouTube videos. Here are some of her greatest hits, which run the gamut from merely obnoxious to aggressively bigoted, and which firmly entrench her as this cycle’s Todd Akin.
Albeit one with a nose stud, which would be an unequivocal signifier of an edgy nonconformist if it was still 1987. In fact, that affectation and Democrat Amanda Curtis’s general vibe tends to remind one of those strident feminists who hang around college quads busily endeavoring to take back the night from mysterious, unseen phallocentric oppressors. Except this one is a major political party’s candidate for the United States Senate, and unlike the goofy womyn’s studies majors we laughed at back in school, we can’t just ignore her. Nor, try as they might, can her fellow Democrat Senate candidates.
If she were a Republican, on the other hand, the press would make her the face of the GOP, stud and all.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, THE WHITE HOUSE WOULD BE A CESSPIT OF OLD-STYLE SEXISM. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! No Men Need Apply: Michelle Obama’s Staff 100% Female.
IS THE GAMING WORLD TEARING ITSELF APART? “Gamers have uncovered evidence of such widespread corruption and conflicts of interest that the gaming blogs may never recover from it. The response from reporters – for the most part, denial and dismissal – is akin to mass professional suicide.”
3 INDIANA CHURCHES VANDALIZED WITH ISLAMIC GRAFFITI.
GOLFER-IN-CHIEF: ‘You are not up to this job’: Parents of SEAL Team Six soldier killed in action call for President Obama’s resignation.
Absolute moral authority. Remember?
JUST THINK HOW WELL WE’D BE DOING IF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WERE SUPPORTING THIS: America’s Oil Boom Overwhelms Global Production Decline.
DON’T WANT ME TO RECLINE MY AIRLINE SEAT? Pay Me.
ROGER KIMBALL: John Maynard Keynes’s revisionist history of World War I has had enduring—and harmful—consequences.
It is often said that the primary existential or spiritual effect of the war was disillusionment. Barbara Tuchman, for example, notes in one of her classic studies of the Great War that the war had many results but that the dominant one was “disillusion.” She quotes D. H. Lawrence, who observed that “All the great words were cancelled out for that generation.” Honor, Nobility, Valor, Patriotism, Sacrifice, Beauty: Who could still take such abstractions seriously after the wholesale slaughter of the war?
But it’s worth interjecting two points. First, it is sometimes said that the Great War, because of its body count, the tactics of its generals, the as-it-turned-out false promise that it was “a war to end all wars,” was therefore meaningless. I submit that, on the contrary, it was instinct with significance. As David Fromkin put it at the end of Europe’s Last Summer, “it was fought to decide the essential questions in international politics: who would achieve mastery in Europe, and therefore in the world, and under the banners of what faith.”
Second, on the matter of culture, it is worth noting that most of the primary innovations in form and sensibility that we associate with that spirit of disillusionment predated the war.
If the general culture becomes pervaded by a sense of disillusionment and “meaculpism” perhaps it’s worth looking at who has the greatest influence on the culture and asking cui bono?
CENSORSHIP: Russia And America.